


Another Story Must Begin

by hoc_voluerunt



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Body Horror, Gen, Hell, Implied Relationships, Javert's Suicide, M/M, Magic Realism, dante's inferno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 20:27:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3663879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoc_voluerunt/pseuds/hoc_voluerunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valjean goes to Heaven, but one who went to Hell was once set by him on the path to goodness. He is sent to help the man complete that journey.</p><p>Inspired by Dante Alighieri's <i>Inferno</i>, where, in Hell, suicides make up a forest of twisted, thorny bushes and trees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Story Must Begin

 

_The water twisted and turned about him, sucking, dragging, plunging, and drowning him until his lungs with water and his body with pain were full to bursting. He had not expected it to last as long as it did; but even after he had died, that sickening, wringing feeling did not leave. It lingered, torturing, for an age, where there was no light and no movement, nothing but a body stiff and shuddering, interrupted only by the baying of dogs and the crying of hungry birds._

 

Valjean was moved from light to light: that of Cosette’s face to that of God’s. His soul smiled, and in the pleasantly blinding bliss, as all the pain and weakness of his body was lifted from him, he saw familiar faces come before him; or, rather, he felt familiar presences, to which he ascribed faces he remembered, dimly at first, and then more and more clearly as the light of Heaven embraced him. He saw Monsieur Myriel, whose soul beamed at him with infinite pride; he saw Fantine, who would have had tears in her eyes if she still had cheeks to wet, gratitude and joy flowing from her which Valjean knew were in great part for Cosette. He felt the eyes of the young revolutionaries, those who had held the barricade to the last, watching him with a small amount of startled awe; and, beyond them, innumerable souls who, once-wretched, now looked on him with a mild, unsurprised gratitude: as one who had once helped, even when they were helpless, and offered mercy and charity to those who would never live to repay it. He saw, very far in the distance and as close to his heart as any of them, his sister, and her children, looking upon him with kindness and pity.

Fantine embraced him, and thanked him, and her pride in him and in their Cosette was overwhelming.

But when the bishop approached him, his presence had a streak of something extraordinary in it. He had once before been asked by this soul to apply himself to a task; now, he felt, he would be gently encouraged to do so again.

“Monseigneur,” Valjean felt he ought to say, although spoken words were not quite what they had been in the world he was used to.

“You followed my advice,” Myriel returned, shining with pride.

“You showed me the way to God,” Valjean replied. “What other path was there?”

He felt something, as of the wry tilt of eternity’s head.

“Not all are so faithful as that.”

Valjean’s confusion — like so much else in that bright, brimming world of nothing — was palpable.

“The mercy of another showed you the path to goodness,” Fantine told him. “Your mercy began another on that path.”

“His soul is tortured,” Myriel mourned. “His task began, but remains incomplete. Help him to finish it.”

That last, like a holy injunction, moved him. He felt the eyes of God look upon him, offering him a task and kindly showing him that, should he decline, he would be loved; and should he accept, he would be loved, and so would another. He opened no mouth in answer.

“Where must I go?”

 

Returning to a body — even a barely corporeal one — was an agony which was tempered by the knowledge that it was in the pursuit and at the command of bliss.

 

The forest was broad: as long and deep as eternity and a half. Its trees rested haphazardly, with no paths to mark the spaces in between. Some were tall, some mere bushes, but most remained around the same level, with their forked branches reaching to little more than an arm’s-length above Valjean’s head. He heard a distant shrieking as of vultures and eagles, and a terrible moaning came from the forest, as if a horrified army hid between the trees. However, there was no one but himself; only Valjean, distant birds, and the knotted, twisted, grey-barked trees, adorned with thorns and browning leaves, were present. He looked about him at the forest, and felt a familiar frown crease familiar lines on a familiar face.

Trusting to God’s direction, he began to walk ahead. As he passed between the trees, he heard the moaning shift and change: the voices passed as if he were passing a soul behind every trunk. Some sobbed, some wailed, some sighed and groaned and choked on pain. When Valjean stopped beside one bent, gnarled trunk, he listened to the sound of someone who heaved out great cries on every outward breath, each gasp a wrenching sound of pain and remorse; but when he circled the tree there was no one there. No figure hid between the roots on any side.

Only then did the terrible possibility strike him.

Avoiding the thorns which marred the wood, Valjean stretched out his hand and placed his palm upon the dry wood. The gasping became a long and drawn-out groan, as if a balm had been placed on a wound which alleviated a little, if not all, of the pain. Valjean looked up at the branches which spread, dry and cracked, above his head, and reached up to pluck off a twig with two wrinkled leaves. Immediately, blood bubbled from the break, thick and dark, and a hideous cry rent the air.

“ _Why?”_ a breathless voice asked. “Is not my torment enough, that you must increase it with your brutality?”

Valjean gasped, and pressed both palms this time flat against the trunk. “I apologise —” He wanted to say ‘madame’, but could not be sure enough of anything in this wood to express it. “I didn’t know it would hurt you.”

The branches above him shuddered, as if in the breeze which precedes a storm. The voice spoke no more; and so Valjean placed the broken twig between two of the tree’s knotted roots, and slowly, respectfully, turned and walked away.

They were souls: grey and twisted, and petrified into wood. The souls of the damned. Valjean kept his silence, not wanting to disturb the moaning of the forest’s souls, but still he could not help but wonder what they all had done to draw this particular punishment upon themselves.

 

Minutes and hours were not applicable there, but Valjean felt that he had wandered the forest for days, perhaps even weeks. He had seen centaurs, now and then, prowling at the edge of his vision and far in the distance, but they must have sensed the grace which had sent him there, and let him be to attend his task in solitude. All around him, the cries of the damned echoed, and he wanted nothing more than to reach out to each and every one and ease their pain; but such torments were ordained, and it was neither his place, nor within his power, to comfort them all. There was only one which he needed to bless, and though he did not know which one it was, he was sure that he would know it when he found it. And so he walked on, as the forest of souls around him cried.

Then he came upon a dying, stunted oak, and his feet halted in place.

The tree was as withered as the rest of them, it’s trunk twisted and knotted, the bark greying, and the leaves brown and small. Vines of thorns hung about its shoulders, and its branches spread, raised and wrung, above his head. This oak was perhaps a head taller than Valjean at the place where its largest branches forked from its trunk, and there was a knot there which opened as if to mimic a mouth which gasped for breath. The soul was silent. Little streams of water trickled along its branches to drop and drain into the bunches of thorns at its trunk, and Valjean had to struggle to find a place where he could safely stretch his hand. He finally focused on a patch of bark — twisted and dry and mostly bare — just below where the branches forked, which he had to raise his eyes to see.

A hunting dog howled somewhere in the distance, and Valjean placed his hand upon the tree as he would upon a taller man’s shoulder. The tree made no sound, but its leaves quivered above and around him, rustled by a non-existent wind, and he took the movement as encouragement. Above him and to his left, a branch dipped down from the main arms of the tree, and drooped its papery leaves within arm’s reach. Valjean ran his fingers through the sparse foliage, and touched the twigs beneath them, wanting only to comfort. A muffled moaning seeped out from the soul before him, and Valjean, in a fit of desperation, pinched his fingers, and firmly snapped off one of the branchlets in his hand.

A harsh, familiar cry rent the air.

The bloody sap that spilled from the wound bubbled and dripped, sinking into the barren soil where it fell. Valjean spoke.

“ _Javert?”_

“You,” came the inspector’s voice, pained, but subdued. The branches of the tree shook, rattling their thorns and brittle leaves. “I should have known my greatest torment was still to come.”

“I’m not here to torment you,” Valjean said, and the tree — the soul — _Javert_ — seemed to sigh, and laugh, and shiver all at once.

“What else can you possibly offer me?” it said. “My limbs have twisted so I can neither arrest you nor flee from you. Must I _think_ so much, even in death?” The soul-tree scoffed at itself. “Though I suppose, I am in Hell. What else is there more fitting?”

“Javert,” Valjean began, but he knew not how to go on if he meant to comfort. Instead, he changed his route before it had begun, and asked a question. “How did you come to be here?”

The twisted oak answered with a well-known bluntness.

“I lived.”

Valjean glanced about him, and knew that this answer was not enough. He didn’t know when his hands had fallen away from the bark, only that now his arms were at his side.

“That is not enough to place you here,” he said. “What did you do to earn this particular torment?”

The soul was silent for just a passing moment. And then it said:

“I died.”

“It is not a sin merely to die,” Valjean returned, but the soul of Javert was quick to answer.

“It is a sin to bring the death upon oneself,” it said. “At least, that’s what the scripture told me. I remember every rule.”

Valjean thought he felt a rueful laugh gathering in his chest. “Of course you do,” he said, though his pity overrode his smile. He thought upon the answer he had been given. “You committed suicide?”

Valjean was certain that, had they been mortal and on the solid Earth, he would have been subject to an indulgent roll of the eyes.

“Surely my body was found and reported on.”

“Surely,” Valjean agreed, “but I hardly knew whether to...”

The newspapers had declared the drowned inspector as having been of momentarily unsound mind, and Valjean had agreed with them, in a way. After all, Javert had let him go free when he had had his claws all but sunk into him — had merely walked away, when Valjean’s arrest was imminent once more. He hadn’t spared much thought for the drowned policeman who had haunted him for so very long; here, however, the evidence of his sin was unforgiving. Valjean placed his hand again on the bark of the oak, and it almost trembled beneath his palm.

“Don’t do that,” it commanded, however weakly. Valjean obeyed, but remained close.

“The other souls down here,” he said, “they all cry out in pain. Why don’t you?”

“I did this to myself,” the oak’s voice answered, matter-of-fact. “I sought out punishment. Why should I complain of it when it comes?”

“You must be in agony,” Valjean frowned.

“I am,” Javert replied. “I am a sinner. I brought destruction on the heads of innocents. Why should I not be in agony? This is my lot, and I must endure it.”

“That isn’t true,” Valjean snapped, on instinct, and the shivering laughter of the oak’s dry thorns reminded him of his surroundings.

“We are in Hell, Valjean,” came Javert’s harsh voice. “Of course it is true.”

 

Valjean sat between the roots of soul-tree. He drew his legs up to his chest and wound his arms about them, and rested his chin upon his knees. The tree at his back — not touching, but there — made no sound. Eventually, the blood ceased to drip from the twig he had broken off, and the stain on the ground seeped away into the brown-grey soil.

 

“They found your body in the Seine,” Valjean said at one point. “Is that indeed how you killed yourself?”

“I stepped from a bridge, yes,” was the tree’s reply.

“Why?” Valjean asked.

“There was nothing else to be done,” said Javert’s soul.

“Did you regret releasing me?” Valjean wondered. “I was willing to go with you, you know. I would not have resisted.”

“I could not arrest you,” the voice from the oak growled.

“Then why did you fall?”

The branches shivered, and a withered, brown leaf or two fluttered down to land beside Valjean. It took a long moment for Valjean to realise that the movement signified a silent, ugly laughter. It was as he came the to realisation that Javert’s voice finally answered.

“I had already fallen,” it said. “Surely you, of all people, must know that.”

Valjean, frowning, turned and craned his neck even though there was no face nor eye to connect with. The tree at his back did not stir, even with its limited movement, to acknowledge him, nor did Javert’s voice speak any more. Valjean did not want to push the matter, but then again, he very much did. Hadn’t Javert been always so devoted to his path that none other had ever been visible?

“How had you fallen?” he asked. “And how does it concern me?”

The tree groaned at him, a small admission of pain.

“Valjean, you are a convict and you are a saint,” it said. “This is mere fact. You poached, and stole, escaped from prison, resisted officers of the law, broke parole, committed fraud on a grand scale; and you gave to charity. You ran a respected business and a respected town. You saved the life of a —” Here there was a pause, as if Javert were frightened of the words he wanted to say. Eventually, his voice went on: _“and_ her daughter. All those acts I thought to be charades in Montreuil were sincere, weren’t they? And then you set me free. You let me go when you had every right to murder me. It would not have been lawful, of course, but it would have been its own justice, any hunted man would have done it and I would have understood that. But you released me, you handed yourself to me. You are a good man, and I — I did nothing but torment you. What does that say about every other person I condemned? What else was I but a sinner who had been blind to — goodness and mercy and — and God himself —”

“Javert —” Valjean began, turning in his seat and raising a hand to the trunk of the tree which could not escape his gentle touch.

“I had been so sure for all my life,” Javert growled, “of my duty, of my simple path. I was wrong, and my mistake condemned others. There is a grace in the world which I could neither understand nor follow, not after what I had done. I failed. I erred. I made a grievous mistake, and, as any subordinate _must_ do, I handed in my resignation. There.”

“You damned yourself.”

“I did so long before I stepped into the Seine. I just didn’t know it.”

Valjean turned away from the tree, and the despair in Javert’s voice, and rested his chin again on his knees.

 

He was not afflicted any more with the pains of his old body. Before his death, he had been ageing and weary, always aching, his movements growing stiffer by the day. Here, beyond life, there was nothing to mark his body out but the fact that it was. It did not weigh on him, was never tired or hungry, and seemed to serve only as a token gesture towards the man he once was.

Behind him, now and then, the withering oak let out a soft and plaintive whine of agony.

 

“You said you were blind to God,” Valjean once said. “Do you see him now?”

“Yes,” Javert answered.

“Surely that is the first step,” he said, all at once understand something important. As the bishop had said: Javert had died with a task unfinished. “You are on the path now to goodness.”

“I am dead,” Javert snapped. “I am on no path whatsoever. Does it look to you as if I can _walk?”_

Valjean tried to lean back, but the thorns that wound about the oak pricked him and forced him to stay sitting up.

“Being on a path was what damned me in the first place,” Javert was grumbling. “But without that direction, I don’t know who I am. What is the law, if the law can be wrong? What is my duty if it is up to me to choose it? Who am I to question the law, but who am I then to obey it? There is nothing. I am lost, and now I must remain so. It is the only justice I can now see.”

In the distance, a pack of hounds bayed in lust of the chase.

“You would not think it justice to arrest me anymore?” Valjean asked. The tree behind him shivered minutely, until a shout gasped out in Javert’s voice, of frustration and pain and rage.

“ _No!”_ he cried. “Is that not _clear_ to you? Oh, God — _God!”_ His voice was lost in a wrenching sob which had no outward sign but the slight quivering of some leaves. Silence fell, and Valjean, turning again, forced his hand between the thorns, scratching his superficial skin, and placed his palm against the grey bark. The dogs howled again, closer now.

“... Javert?”

“I am in Hell,”he said, strained and straining. “I am in _Hell,_ and if it is to be so, so be it. At least here I might torment my own mind in peace.”

There was a scratching, as of claws in the dust, nearby, and Valjean hurried to his feet.

“Are those dogs coming nearer?” he asked.

“They tear apart the profligate,” Javert answered, almost automatically. “They’ll hurt us when they pass.”

In a flash, a naked woman, bleeding in places from the scratches of branches and thorns, sprinted past them, glancing over her shoulder as she went. As she disappeared into the forest again, Valjean saw, approaching in pursuit, a pack of dogs, with matted, black fur and burning eyes, roiling and roaring. As they ran, their claws left deep marks in the dirt and the roots of the surrounding soul-trees, which shrieked at the added torture. Their open, bloody maws ripped through bushes and hanging leaves and thorns, scattering the debris of tortured souls; and Javert’s tree trembled just slightly in its branches at their approach.

Valjean took a deep breath, although his lungs did not need it, and stepped over Javert’s roots to face the oncoming pack.

“Valjean, don’t you dare —” Javert began to growl, but already the hounds were nearly upon them, and Valjean stepped up, making himself broad and swinging his arms like clubs through the air.

“Back!” he cried. “Get back, you dogs! This soul is protected, and you _may not_ approach!”

At his shout, the dogs began to skid to a halt, claws digging into the dirt and long, thin legs jerking in their sudden stop. Valjean glared at them in their sagging, bright eyes, and his glare forbade them as much as his words from coming closer. As one, the mass of fur and teeth shifted, rolled, and twitched about; and, though they growled and barked, the pack loped and trotted away, disappearing quickly into the trees. Valjean straightened, and his shoulders fell back, and he returned to his place before Javert’s soul. He though the thorns looked a little sharper and more dense than before.

“You should not have done that,” Javert’s voice said, quiet and blunt.

“My task is to save you,” Valjean rebutted. Javert’s whole trunk seemed, somehow, to shift, as if the man had drawn himself up — raised his chin and broadened his shoulders as he would before a confrontation or arrest — and the bark seemed tighter than before.

“You always were a contradiction, Jean Valjean.”

It did not sound like a compliment.

 

There was no night in the forest; but in the space that felt to Valjean like it might be night, he listened to the long, low, moans — almost wails — which the tree behind him emanated from the depth of its tortured soul.

 

“I was a pruner in Faverolles,” Valjean said. “Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

Valjean smiled to himself at the oak’s unceremonious frankness.

“I wonder if I might not be able to help you,” he went on. Javert’s leaves rattled in his consternation.

“When will you learn, Valjean,” he said, “that I am not here to be helped? I do not deserve mercy, from you or from God. I _sinned._ Grossly.”

“You recognise that fact, however,” Valjean said, keeping his voice mild, as he pushed to his feet and faced the tree. “You realise the mistakes that you made. You see the path which God would have had you tread. Can you not see that that in itself is the start of redemption?”

Javert’s voice was tight, from pain and anger, when he replied.

“ _I. Sinned.”_

Valjean ignored him.

“I shall be as gentle as I can,” he said; and raised his hands to the tangle of thorny vines wrapped around the trunk of the oak. Javert hissed at the touch — but when Valjean snapped one of the bone-dry vines, no blood or sap escaped, and Javert did not cry out. Slowly, carefully, Valjean followed the vine’s skein, pulling it out from the knotted bundles around the tree’s body, snapping it in places, and drawing out shards of hard, dry foliage which began to collect in a pile at his feet. The work was old but familiar — an ancient habit — and came to him without his needing to think much about it. Occasionally, Javert would gasp, or bite out a shout, when the vines tightened or the thorns dug into his bark, and Valjean would whisper senseless, hushing sounds, and press his palms to Javert’s trunk in comfort.

The work took, perhaps, the equivalent of days. The vines seemed interminable, but Valjean never tired: his arms never did ache, nor his knees grow stiff; his feet did not blister, and the thorns’ scratches never lasted long on his fingers and palms. Slowly, surely, the trunk of Javert’s soul-tree was freed from its thorny cage. As the pile of broken, useless vines beside Valjean grew, the expanse of twisted, gnarled, and knotted bark before him became clearer. The winding vines which hung upon Javert’s branches were harder to reach, but Valjean climbed tenderly on his roots, and very gently peeled the thorns away from his arms. When finally he stepped down with the last, cracked vine in his hands, a sound was loosed from the tree: a long, low, sighing groan, exhausted and relieved and utterly remorseful. When Javert spoke, his voice was a whisper, drowned and drained.

“You should not have done that.”

Valjean smiled, and pressed both hands to the bark before him, where, he supposed, Javert’s chest would have been.

“Mercy is not so undeserved as you might think,” he said. “Even by you.”

 

With the thorns gone, Valjean could sit with his back to Javert’s trunk, his legs thrown before him in line with Javert’s roots, and his head tipped back and resting somewhere about the tree’s waist. Javert did not make even a token protest, but merely sighed, as if in indignant resignation.

 

It looked like Javert’s branches had begun to droop, as if being drawn down by a heavy weight. The wrinkled, dead leaves — one of which fluttered every now and then down to land in Valjean’s lap — seemed to cling ever more feebly to their twigs, and the strongest arms of branches had weakened in their twisted, petrified state. Valjean found that, if he stood on his toes, he could run his fingers over even the upper-most limit of the main, forked branches, and Javert would only keen just slightly at the touch to his over-sensitised, agonised form.

“There is a mercy in the world to which I was blind,” he said one time. “There is a justice higher than that I learned to believe in.”

Valjean smiled up at him.

“I’m glad for you,” he said, and Javert groaned.

“I am not,” was his reply. “I wish I could have used this knowledge in my work, but — without certainty — what _could_ I have done?”

“You are learning to think these things for yourself,” said Valjean gently. “Do you not suppose you might have been able, at some time, to judge for yourself?”

“Who am I to judge anyone?” Javert snarled. Valjean’s enigmatic smile remained in place, but it was kinder — less distant — than the enigmatic smile of Madeleine.

“Only God may judge our souls,” he said. “Policemen are still allowed to judge our earthly crimes.”

“Should I have judged you?”

“You did.”

“I did not,” Javert insisted, almost with a pained scoff. “The law judged you. The evidence judged you. I implemented the law, I did not judge for it.”

“And now?” Valjean rebutted. His right hand was smoothing back and forth across the gnarled wood around where Javert’s chest and shoulder would have been. “How would you judge me now, policeman to citizen?”

“You’re a saint,” Javert blurted out, “you deserved none of it.”

“Ignore what you know of me now,” Valjean said, with the utmost patience he must only have learnt by raising a child. “I broke a window and stole some bread.”

There was a long silence. Valjean’s hand slowed to halt upon the junction of Javert’s branches.

“You and your family were starving,” Javert eventually said. It sounded like a rote repetition.

“Do you believe that absolved me of guilt?”

“No,” Javert snapped — and then: “Perhaps — one’s situation...” He let out a harsh, mirthless, single shout of laughter. “But you might have been lying. You might have been drunk. You might have been malicious. How would I know whether to believe you?”

Valjean’s smile turned wry. “You were an intelligent man, Inspector,” he said. “I have no doubt that you would have been able to do it.”

Javert fell silent again. After a while, a long, soft sigh escaped him, and he grumbled:

“Perhaps.”

 

In the lulls between their conversations, in what would have been night — in what perhaps was night, eternal and endless — Javert cried. There were no tears, except perhaps the little trickles like river water which still seeped down his branches and trunk, but there was agony in his voice, both physical and spiritual, and Valjean could do nothing in such moments but press his back to space between Javert’s roots and pray. Eventually, Javert would stop — often with a gasp as of realisation — and after a while of his stoic silence, they would talk again.

 

Valjean was startled once by the sudden touch of a palm’s-breadth of wood, tumbling past his shoulder and head. When he turned around, the bark at Javert’s left shoulder had peeled away, revealing soft and stable skin beneath. It was a little dark, a little freckled, a little pockmarked, but it was undeniably Javert’s muscle and bone beneath. The edges of the little patch were fringed with bark, the seam a painful-looking melding of the two. When Valjean lifted reverent fingers to the skin, he breathed a question before he’d even touched.

“How does it feel?”

Javert’s skin jumped at the first touch of his calloused fingertips.

“Raw,” was all he said, tight and blunt. Valjean’s smile grew, an expression of awe and grace and joy.

“You are being born anew,” he said, gazing up at where Javert’s face would be; where the knot between his branches still stretched in a twisted impression of a screaming, gasping mouth.

“If it feels like this,” Javert huffed, “I do not want to.”

Valjean grinned.

“I think you do.”

Javert did not contradict him.

 

Slowly — very, very slowly — Javert changed. At his trunk, back and front and sides, more and more patches of grey bark peeled away, showing the skin raw and whole beneath. Valjean brushed his hands over every new revelation, and talked with Javert about the justice of mercy. Javert listed case upon case of arrests he now looked on with mournful regret, of dismissals he recollected with angry disappointment. He did not quite curse Bamatabois, or revere Fantine, but he agreed that there was more — much more — to their case than a whore who attacked a citizen.

Then he laughed, almost silently, and said, “But then you would never have had a daughter,” as if he understood precisely how much Cosette had meant to Valjean.

Valjean, at this, pressed both hands to the irregular patches of skin over each set of Javert’s ribs, and smiled at his roots.

 

The ground was littered with slivers of bark, twigs and dead leaves, which dropped continuously as Javert’s branches shrank and untwisted into arms.

 

When Valjean looked up to see a head and face, contorted in agony, where the gaping knot had been, he did not quell the impulse to press his palms to Javert’s cheeks and weep for his pain. At the touch, the expression on Javert’s face softened minutely, and, though his eyes could not open and wood still encrusted his features, his spine creaked and cracked so he could press one side of his face into Valjean’s palm.

A few flakes of bark cleaved from his neck, and tumbled to the ground, where they lay inert and harmless.

 

Javert’s legs, from hip to knee, came free at almost the same time as his arms were finally allowed to droop from their upraised strain. As the last of the bark peeled away from his pubic hair and the knobs of his knees, his forearms dropped and his fingers fell loose from their encrustations, while his still-caged shoulder-blades and neck allowed his upper arms to begin to relax. A sliver of wood had fallen from his mouth, revealing a glimpse of tongue and teeth. His body was more corporeal by far than Valjean’s, and, through the gap, he sucked harsh, reviving breaths which set his chest to heaving. Trickles of water escaped through the crack.

 

The process was long, and slow, and Valjean stood and watched the entire thing.

 

Eventually, Javert’s shoulders and feet came free, and his whole frame slumped, almost collapsed, into Valjean’s waiting arms. Wood still clung to his calves, and between his toes, but the last of it was jolted from his mouth and chin as he fell. He began to cough, and retch, and Valjean helped him to his knees, humming hushed noises and phrases he’d learnt when Cosette was ill. Javert coughed up what seemed an improbable amount of water, as if it had filled more than just his lungs. A scrap of bark was sloughed from Javert’s back when Valjean’s hand brushed past it in comfort.

“There now, Javert,” Valjean soothed. One of the man’s ears was mostly free, but the top of his head down to the nape of his neck, the bridge of his nose, and the crests of his cheeks, was still entrapped. “There now.”

“Thank you,” Javert sighed — with his own mouth, his own throat, his own breath in his own chest — and then amended it. “Thank _God...”_

 

Over time, and under Valjean’s gentle hands, the bark around Javert’s head and face peeled and scraped and fell away. Slowly, his hair and ears and temples came free, the wood at the back of his head coming away in great, agonising chunks, while that on his face seemed more resistant, dropping off in irregular splinters. Throughout, Javert remained curled on the ground, within the embrace of Valjean’s arms, with Valjean’s fingers stirring through his hair and his palms smoothing over his skin, and his voice responding with kind and gentle sounds to Javert’s pain. He would whisper platitudes which Javert was inclined to believe, and promises he felt certain would be kept. When the first slice was dropped from Javert’s left eye, leaving a little V of an opening, and Javert gasped and blinked his dark, wet eye, Valjean wept again, this time for joy. He held Javert in his arms as his eyelashes quivered under the wood, and he gazed upon Valjean and asked, breathless:

“Am I saved?”

Valjean smiled down at him, one arm supporting Javert’s back and the other pressed against the wood and skin of his face.

“I think you may be.”

 

The last of the bark was a painful process. Javert groaned, and twitched, and buried his face in Valjean’s shoulder and chest, as the remaining wood peeled itself away from his nose and brow. The last curve of his ear became visible. He was, as before, taller than Valjean, and his long legs looked almost absurd, thrown out along the ground beside Valjean’s shorter limbs. Everything about him looked more vulnerable without the cover of his uniform. His arms were strong, yet somehow gangly, and they curled around Valjean’s waist as he howled, and the bark cracked off in splinters from his right eye.

 

At the end, harpies and centaurs and hounds gathered in a circle around them in the distance, screeching and howling and shouting their anger. Javert panted in Valjean’s arms, the last piece of park having cracked, and twitched, and scraped itself from his cheek, and Valjean leaned over to press a kiss to the fresh skin. The light around them grew brighter.

“Javert,” he whispered — “you are saved.”

Javert looked up: first he caught Valjean’s eye and a shocked and grateful smile touched his lips, the first painless expression he had given in the forest; then he looked past Valjean, to the light of heaven, and his eyes grew wide with awe. The lines around his mouth and between his eyes slackened, and without their sternness, he looked infinitely softer, kinder, and more just. His hands pressed closer, and his arms pulled tighter, on Valjean, and his eyes were fixed on the light of Heaven which gathered around them. He breathed only a sound.

“Oh.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The section of _Inferno_ on the forest of thorns is in [Canto XIII](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1001/1001-h/1001-h.htm#CantoXIII). This is my first time writing _Les Mis_ fic, so please be gentle. Also I don't really know much about Christian theology, but the spiritual gist of what Hugo seemed to be aiming at isn't particularly prescriptive? But do let me know if I've screwed up something terrible (apart from, probably, the permanence of Hell).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Cover Art] for "Another Story Must Begin" by hoc_voluerunt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13314591) by [Hamstermoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hamstermoon/pseuds/Hamstermoon)




End file.
